Feodor Fedorenko

Feodor Fedorenko or Fyodor Federenko (September 17, 1907 – July 28, 1987) was a Soviet Nazi collaborator and war criminal who served at Treblinka extermination camp in German occupied Poland during World War II.

The report of the Soviet Interrogation of Defendant Aleksandr Ivanovich Yeger (born in 1918, Germany), includes the section devoted to Fedorenko's activities at the Treblinka extermination camp in occupied Poland (excerpt).

He was mobilized into the Soviet Army in June 1941, around the time of the Nazi German Operation Barbarossa.

He was a truck driver, and had no previous military training.

Within two or three weeks, his group was encircled twice by the German army.

He escaped the first time, but he was captured three days later by the Germans and transported to Zhytomyr, then Rivne, and finally to Chełm, Poland.

At the Chełm prisoner-of-war camp, German officers from Operation Reinhard recruited 200 to 300 captured Soviet soldiers for military training as auxiliary police in the service of Nazi Germany within General Government.

They were sent to the Trawniki concentration camp SS training division, and Fedorenko was among them.

Fedorenko was one of approximately 5,000 Trawniki men trained as Holocaust executioners by SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Streibel from Operation Reinhard.

The Hiwi shooters, known in German as the Trawnikimänner, were deployed to all major killing sites of the Final Solution, augmented by the SS and Schupo, as well as Ordnungspolizei formations.

The German Order Police performed roundups inside the Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland shooting everyone unable to move or attempting to flee, while the Trawnikis conducted large-scale civilian massacres in the same locations.

It was their primary purpose of training.

In the spring of 1942 Fedorenko was deployed from Trawniki to the Lublin Ghetto.

It is known from historical record that between mid-March and mid-April 1942 over 30,000 Jews from Lublin Ghetto were transported to their deaths in cattle trucks at the Bełżec extermination camp and additional 4,000 at Majdanek.

Fedorenko claimed in his postwar hearing that he was issued a rifle which was not fired.

From Lublin, he was sent to the Warsaw Ghetto with his Sonderdienst battalion of 80 to 100 executioners.

He was dispatched to Treblinka approximately in September 1942.

Fedorenko became a non-commissioned officer attaining the rank of Oberwacher. From September 1942 to August 1943, he led a 200-member ex-Soviet soldier detachment which shaved, stripped, beat and gassed prisoners brought to Treblinka.

"FEDORENKO had the rank of an SS oberwachman. He was assistant to the commander of the first platoon of a guards company in the Treblinka 'death camp'. He came together with me from the city of Warsaw to the Treblinka 'death camp'. He took part in the shooting of citizens of Jewish nationality during the unloading of trains, in the undressing places to the gas chambers and to the 'infirmary'. At the end of 1943, he left for Danzig as part of a company of guards. I did not meet him again and do not know where he is now. — Yeger: Investigation Department of Ministry of State Security of the Ukraine."

After the end of the war, Fedorenko abandoned his wife and two children, who remained in the Soviet Union, and spent four years living as a war refugee in West Germany, working for the British from 1945 to 1949.

As a former Soviet citizen admitted to the United States under a DPA visa (1949), Fedorenko became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1970.

Fedorenko emigrated to the United States from Hamburg in 1949 and was granted permanent residency status under the Displaced Persons Act.

He initially resided in Philadelphia but later settled in Waterbury, Connecticut, where he found employment as a brass factory worker.

Fedorenko would reside in Waterbury for the next two decades.

While Fedorenko's life in the United States was quiet, he had been identified as a possible war criminal.

Treblinka survivors identified him as a guard at the camp from a collection of photographs and documents that had been captured from the SS.

In the mid-sixties his name and Waterbury, Connecticut address were included on a list of fifty-nine war criminals living in America.

The list was compiled in Europe and Israel and forwarded to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in the United States.

He was granted U.S. citizenship in 1970, however and later retired to Miami Beach, Florida in 1973.

In the mid-70s, Congressional Representatives Joshua Eilberg and Elizabeth Holtzman initiated a set of hearings that led the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate the handling of possible Nazi war criminal data.

No mishandling was found, but as a result, a Special Litigation Unit for the investigation of Nazi war criminals was established in the INS.

The information supplied in the sixties was now put to use.

He was discovered in 1977 and denaturalized in 1981.

Subsequently, he was deported to the USSR, sentenced to death there for treason and participating in the Holocaust.

In 1977, the INS supplied information on Fedorenko to Justice Department prosecutors.

Fedorenko was executed in 1987.

Fedorenko was born in Dzhankoy in the Sivash region of the Crimea, in southern Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire).

In 2005, a Russian documentary, Secrets of the Century – Punishers: May 9th ("Тайны века - Каратели: Девятое Мая"), claimed that in 1974, Fedorenko had visited Crimea as a tourist.

There, he was recognised and drew the interest of the KGB.

Afterwards, the Soviet government contacted the White House and requested that the case of Fedorenko be reviewed.